Quotes About Idols

It's cool to meet your idols. It's a good opportunity to travel. Those kinds of things are good.

When a prophet is accepted and deified, his message is lost. The prophet is only useful so long as he is stoned as a public nuisance, calling us to repentance, disturbing our comfortable routines, breaking our respectable idols, shattering our sacred conventions."7 We will always have a love-hate relationship with the prophets.

Selon Troubetskoï, "nous devons nous habituer à l'idée que le monde romano-germanique, avec toute sa culture, soit notre pire ennemi. Nous devons renverser et piétiner sans pitié les idoles des idéaux sociaux et des préjugés empruntés à l'Occident, qui orientent toujours les idées de nos intellectuels

Among modern idols the worst is the homeland Its robe is the shroud of religion

Alas for a love whose fire is extinct, A love that was born in the Holy Place and died in the house of idols!

This generation is destroyed by the so-called role models.

Since sin, the consequence of idolatry, is what keeps humans in thrall to the nongods of the world, dealing with sin has a more profound effect than simply releasing humans to go to heaven. It releases humans from the grip of the idols, so they can worship the living God and be renewed according to his image.

Sin," for Paul, is therefore not simply the breaking of moral codes, though it can be recognized in that way. It is, far more deeply, the missing of the mark of genuine humanness through the failure of worship or rather through worshipping idols rather than the true God.

Humans are designed to worship God and exercise responsibility in his world. But when humans worship idols instead, so that their image-bearing humanness corrupts itself into sin, missing the mark of the human vocation, they hand over their power to those same idols. The idols then use this power to tyrannize and ultimately to destroy their devotees and the wider world. But when sins are forgiven, the idols lose their power.

this event, all the early Christians tell us, the living God was revealed in human form, in utter self-giving love, to be the focus of grateful worship, worship that would replace the idols and would therefore generate a new, truly human existence in which the deadly grip of sin had been broken forever.

The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—"forces" within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the Creator.

idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God.

Jesus's followers themselves were to be given a new kind of task. The Great Jailer had been overpowered; now someone had to go and unlock the prison doors. Forgiveness of sins had been accomplished, robbing the idols of their power; someone had to go and announce the amnesty to "sinners" far and wide. And this had to be done by means of the new sort of power: the cross-resurrection-Spirit kind of power. The power of suffering love.

There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God's eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who have resolutely worshipped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God's world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.

sets us free in our personal lives from the need to worship or trust idols, and in our public lives from the pressure to serve the needs of an idolatrous state.

But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols—if we allow them to take over any of God's functions in our lives.

Redemption consists primarily of casting out our mental idols and turning back to the true God. And when we do that, we will experience His transforming power renewing every aspect of our lives. To talk of a Christian Worldview is simply another way of saying that when we are redeemed, our entire outlook on life is re-centered on God and rebuilt on His revealed truth.

If reductionism is like trying to stuff all of reality into a box, we could say the problem is that the box is always too small. Idols deify some part of the created order. But no matter which part they choose, a part is always too limited to explain the whole. The universe is too complex and multi-dimensional to fit into a box composed of just one part. Invariably something will stick out. Something will not fit into its restricted conceptual categories.

To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.

We must be committed to turning away from idols and toward God as the ultimate source of truth in every area of life. To avoid being "conformed to this world," we must "be transformed by the renewal of your mind

So here is Paul's diagnosis of the human condition so far: God is constantly reaching out to people with evidence of his existence through general revelation. But humans are constantly suppressing those truths by creating idols.

Reductionism is the key to explaining why idols lead to immoral behavior—why Romans 1 ends with a list of destructive and self-destructive behavior. When we dehumanize people in our thinking, we will eventually mistreat, oppress, abuse, and exploit them in our actions.

Why do idols invariably lead to destructive behavior? What is the connection? The link is that idols always lead to a lower view of human life.

When God gives people up to their idols, the result is always a reductionistic view of humanity—which ultimately unleashes harmful and destructive behavior. When we reduce people to anything less than fully human, we will treat them as less than fully human. When we define God as a something instead of a Someone, we will tend to treat humans as somethings too.